City Fibre

They do seem to be in a bit of a hurry to tank their reputation. I understand wanting to get off a dodgy IP range they leased but just stop your DHCP server advertising it and wait for the lease to renew and offer a new address, don’t just yank it from the routes you advertise and hope people have an alternative way to get to your forum where you’ve made the announcement.

“Move fast and break things” is admirable to a point but your customers need to have opted in to that approach, and they probably don’t want their ISP to be doing it.
 
Yayzi down for me in Birmingham last hour.

And my 4g on O2 is really struggling too. Keeps flicking from 4g to h/h+

Why when you reboot router does it take so long for 5 GHz WiFi to come back online? 2.4 is almost instant.
 
As an outside observer one of the worst things about Yayzi is that they seem to have fanboys, which sounds ridiculous for an ISP. Their community forum is modded by someone who doesn't work for the company, and loads of replies are along the lines of "give them a chance, I'm sure they are working hard". This isn't a kickstarter or a charity, they really need to grow up.

Edit: From the sounds of things the service has gone again, stuff like this is ridiculous, making breaking changes at 09:20 on a Monday morning, and the comms around it are "be patient we are trying!!". Sort yourselves out.

g3dpehV.png
 
Last edited:
That point where I said if things changed I would revisit the situation feels closer today. I’m not going to call out the moderation in another forum, but it’s obvious that moderation roles don’t come with prior knowledge/communication of impending changes that will significantly increase traffic/posts of a less positive nature. Heck, even my household get more communication of planned downtime than this and it’s never scheduled for peak times.
 
Last edited:
I'd be annoyed if it was my connection, but I'd have to crawl into a hole under a cloud of shame if I'd recommended them to somebody non-technical.
 
Caged said:
As an outside observer one of the worst things about Yayzi is that they seem to have fanboys, which sounds ridiculous for an ISP. Their community forum is modded by someone who doesn't work for the company, and loads of replies are along the lines of "give them a chance, I'm sure they are working hard". This isn't a kickstarter or a charity, they really need to grow up.

Edit: From the sounds of things the service has gone again, stuff like this is ridiculous, making breaking changes at 09:20 on a Monday morning, and the comms around it are "be patient we are trying!!". Sort yourselves out.

g3dpehV.png
Click to expand...
Yayzi was recommended to me on this forum.

I hadn't realised however that these city fibre ISPs were so small and essentially start ups. However aside from this event, its otherwise been reliable.

Im really not sure what all the stuff is that they're trying to do in the background to the servers etc. Its good that they are improving the service but a little frustrating that customers are the guinea pigs for it.


Ive been more frustrated with the router. Its fine for just plug and play, but I like to optimise and it was difficult to find the settings for changing DNS servers, and I can't select the wifi channels and channel width I'd prefer to use, plus it takes ages to reboot the 5 Ghz (yes I am using a DFS channel but I have to because its congested around here).
 
Unfortunately smaller ISP’s come with additional risk, Airband for example just stopped answering the out of hours faults calls over the weekend, heck even VM and O2 can’t manage to dispatch kit at present due to a chemical spill in an adjoining warehouse. What you have to hope is they don’t do is make poor choices, and in the event they do, that they learn from them rather than repeat them. Liam’s usually pretty straight up about admitting when things went wrong, but the last 24hrs has shown that lessons haven’t been learned from previous issues, and that doesn’t sit well with me. Let’s see how today plays out.
 
Last edited:
A lot of them do seem to be tiny ISP’s which in itself isn’t bad but people get drawn to them because they can get 1Gb speeds for around £29 but they aren’t as established as the bigger ISP’s which can cause problems.

I was looking at Yayzi when I was making move to City Fibre but glad I chose a bigger more established ISP in the end.
 
I'm so glad i moved away from Yayzi. I often had constant geo location issues and numerous times when my connection would drop and sometimes it would be for multiple hours. Since joining Aquiss i haven't had any issues at all...so far!
 
Caged said:
They do seem to be in a bit of a hurry to tank their reputation. I understand wanting to get off a dodgy IP range they leased but just stop your DHCP server advertising it and wait for the lease to renew and offer a new address, don’t just yank it from the routes you advertise and hope people have an alternative way to get to your forum where you’ve made the announcement.

“Move fast and break things” is admirable to a point but your customers need to have opted in to that approach, and they probably don’t want their ISP to be doing it.
Click to expand...
Just out of interest. But how can an IP range be dodgy?
 
SonicSW20 said:
One of their IP ranges was incorrectly geolocated as being outside of the UK. This meant their customers couldn't access geolocked websites and services.
Click to expand...
Wow really... What a fudgeup. How were those IP addresses even usable, considering the popularity of Netflix and the like.
 
Last edited:
Well they weren't usable, if you define usable as "being able to access commonly used online services". There's nothing wrong with leasing IP addresses (technically I don't think you're meant to but there's no other way to deal with IPv4 exhaustion) but you can't start deploying them instantly if they were allocated to a provider in a different country a few weeks ago.
 
People were getting geolocated to Iran among other places, TikTok didn't work, eBay didn't work. Was a farce. That's what this mornings outage was I believe, getting people off that IP range.
 
Apparently they were assured the range was correctly located and ready for use ahead of time and took that assurance as being correct. I suppose at least this time they asked, but I am a firm believer in ‘Trust, but verify’ and clearly no meaningful verification was done, despite claims to the contrary - you can’t argue with being geo-located in Iran, though TikTok not working is a bonus and no ebay would have a positive impact on my bank balance. Speed issues kicked in for me yesterday morning, we are up to about 100mbit today, on the basis that it’s been communicated, apparently CF requested it while migrating, and the timescale for it to be resolved is apparently just over a day away, it’s not worth getting bent out of shape over at this point.

I would love to think this could be the turning point, as they are making the right noises (moving things in-house, investing in the network etc.), but if I am honest, I did have a look at three other ISP’s yesterday, my wish list of multi-gig, decent peering, static IPv4 and ideally IPv6, DHCP, UK based CS and ideally a no equipment option seems destined to end with compromise. The UK obsession with PPPoE is just odd.
 
PPPoE would likely solve the issue Yayzi are having where they keep having to make network-breaking changes to shift IP addresses around, and have to take people's statics away during the migration. It's a very common way to deliver non-ethernet services, is hardware accelerated in sub-£100 boxes that ISPs hand out, and with baby jumbo frames there's no throughput impact either. Granted it does cause issues with some BSD-based routers but the answers to that are either to throw enough single-core performance at the problem so it's not an issue, or sponsor efforts to improve the software and wait a bit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom